What a country does when something goes wrong

For a long time I thought the interesting part of travelling was the difference. You go somewhere far away to be surprised, and you are: by the food, by the noise, by how early or late a city starts. That surprise wears off faster than anyone admits. What outlasts it is the opposite discovery — how few problems there actually are, and how many answers people have built for them.

Every country I have been to is working on the same short list. How to keep people safe from each other. How to educate a child whose parents cannot. How to give an ordinary family a fair chance at a decent life. How to make a decision that will bind people who had no part in making it. The languages differ. The list does not.

A good day tells you almost nothing

What took me longer to work out was where to look, because the obvious place is useless.

Any system looks competent when nothing has gone wrong. The airport that moves forty thousand people without incident, the office that processes the form, the train that leaves at the minute printed on the board — all of that is a system running comfortably inside its own assumptions. It is the least informative thing you can watch. Every country has good days, and on a good day they all look roughly the same.

The moment worth paying attention to is the one where the script runs out.

Who is allowed to deviate

Something goes wrong. A document is missing. A road is closed. A connection has gone. A rule written for one situation has been applied, correctly and absurdly, to a different one. And you find yourself standing in front of a single person who is now the whole institution as far as you are concerned.

What happens in the next ninety seconds is the most revealing thing about the place you are standing in.

Sometimes that person can simply solve it. They look at the case, recognise that it is not what the rule was for, and deal with it — not by breaking anything, but because somebody above them decided years ago that this is exactly the kind of judgment the job requires.

Sometimes the same person, facing the same problem, cannot. Not because they are unkind or slow. Very often they are visibly sorry, and that is the part that stays with you. They have simply been given no authority to depart from the script, and the person who has it is not reachable, and the mechanism for reaching them was designed for a different century.

You do not learn what a country believes by reading its laws. You learn it by watching how far down the organisation the permission to think extends.

The script is not the enemy

I want to be careful here, because the easy conclusion is that discretion is good and rules are rigid and bad, and thirty years of doing this for a living have taught me that is wrong.

A script is a protection. It protects the person in front of you from the mood of the person behind the counter. It means the answer you get does not depend on how you are dressed, or what you are willing to offer, or whether the official is having a bad week. The places where every clerk can improvise are not paradises. They are places where your outcome depends on which clerk you happen to get, and everyone who lives there knows it and plans around it.

So it is not a choice between rules and judgment. Every country has picked a point on that line, and the honest observation is that they have all picked a defensible one. What separates them is something less dramatic and more damning: whether anyone has looked at where they put it recently.

The failures I have watched are almost never a country choosing wrongly. They are a country having chosen, sensibly, for a problem that no longer exists — and nobody since whose job it was to check.

Why the differences are not what you expect

The other thing that goes is the assumption that these choices are ideological. They are usually historical.

A country that was occupied builds differently from one that was not. A country that has been through a currency collapse writes rules about money that look paranoid until you know what they are remembering. A country whose civil service was, at some point, genuinely dangerous will bind it in a way that looks like distrust and is actually scar tissue. The rule is rarely a belief. It is a memory, still doing its job long after everyone who formed it has gone.

Which means judging it from the outside — from a hotel, in a week, in a language you do not read — is mostly an exercise in confirming what you already thought.

What I bring home

I come back to Howard County and I catch myself doing it here. Standing in a lobby, or on a call, or in a meeting about a process that made sense when it was written, asking the same question I ask in an unfamiliar airport: if this goes wrong for someone, who is allowed to fix it, and can they actually do it today?

It is a better question than the one I used to ask, which was whether the rules were right. Rules age. The capacity to notice that they have aged is the thing worth building, and it is the thing almost nobody builds.

Sixty-seven and counting. I stopped looking for the country that has it right some time ago — that was always a slightly juvenile way to travel. What I look for now is the particular trade each place has made between the script and the judgment, and whether anyone there still remembers making it.

The countries, and the photographs, are on the travel page.